In his defence, a copy of a letter sent to the Sunday Times posted on the Cageprisoners site, Begg distances himself from the Taliban by drawing attention to his criticism of their human rights abuses, while saying that he has "advocated for engagement and dialogue with the Taliban well before our own government took the official position of doing the same". Begg also claims the Sunday Times gave a partial and misleading account of Cageprisoners' activity and its relationship with Amnesty.

Sahgal herself has a long history of activism on human rights, women's rights and the dangers posed to both by religious fundamentalism. While Sahgal wholeheartedly supported the Amnesty campaign against the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantánamo, she raised pertinent anxieties about Amnesty's close engagement with Begg internally several times without success. She pointed out the obvious but significant fact that being a victim of human rights violations does not automatically make you a defender of human rights, the dangers in eliding the two and the need for Amnesty to maintain a distance from individuals whose attitude to the Taliban could undermine otherwise excellent work done by Amnesty on violence against women.

Within hours of the article appearing she was suspended from her job by Amnesty for, as Gita says in her statement, "trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty's mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially". And for some hours yesterday, negative posts on Amnesty's website were being filtered out.

We welcome whistleblowers when they expose wrongdoing in government or the corporate sector. This is not, technically, a case of whistleblowing because none of these activities were hidden – it was a failure to join the dots on the part of Amnesty about which a senior member of staff went public on principle.

Why should the third sector be immune from internal critics? It is a significant player in Britain: more people work in this sector than in banking, it influences the direction of government policy and public opinion, and consequently it should be held accountable like any other organisation. These debates need to be had in public rather than behind closed doors. Amnesty's attempt to shut down the debate by using the same tactics as their opponents is shameful.

The downside with a public debate is that it becomes an opportunity for rightwingers who want to attack Amnesty to jump on the bandwagon. However, we cannot censor ourselves from taking a principled stand just because there are people standing by to exploit it and further their own agendas.

This is no ordinary spat between two individuals and an organisation. It is an attempt to tease out the contradictions that bedevil the human rights debate in this country. In the campaign to achieve human rights, whose human rights get privileged? In the attempt to redress the balance, liberal-left thinking correctly identifies Muslims as the underdogs, especially those who have been terrorised by the state in its war on terror agenda. But beyond that, we need a more sophisticated response so that the human rights of even more powerless groups, such as women and sexual minorities, do not get trampled once again.

If the government could sever its links, albeit temporarily, with the Muslim Council of Britain because of the politics of its deputy general secretary, surely Amnesty can take a lead. It will take a long time for Amnesty to recover from this blow to its reputation. It has betrayed its own history and, by so doing, it has betrayed all of us who looked to it as a champion of human rights.